The US justice confirmed the payment of bribes in Petroecuador during the governments of Rafael Correa and Lenín Moreno

A US judicial process revealed new elements about the corruption framework within Petroecuador, the Ecuadorian public company whose officials have accepted bribes to grant contracts for the sale of Ecuadorian crude oil. The names of brothers Antonio and Enrique Pere Ycaza appeared in the Eastern District Court of New York. Antonio Pere pleaded guilty to the crimes of money laundering and violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The US court notified his conviction and ordered the confiscation of his assets that would be valued at more than USD 45.8 million.

The fact that Pere has accepted the charges against him confirms what the media such as Expreso and Investigative Journalism have already alerted in Ecuador: there was a plot of bribes to Ecuadorian officials between 2011 and 2019, during the governments of Rafael Correa and his successor Lenín Moreno. Pere used U.S. companies and bank accounts to bribe Petroecuador officials in favor of two companies, identified as “commercial enterprise 1 and 2″ and for Asphalt Company.

According to the newspaper Expreso, which has followed up the case, Antonio and Enrique Pere Ycaza together with “commercial company 1″ decided to bribe Ecuadorian officials in order to benefit “from the contract that Petroecuador signed with a state-owned entity in Asia, whose name is not disclosed, but the United States assures to know him. Around June 2011, commercial company 1 agreed with the Asian state-owned company to assume the risk and maintain the product purchased under any contract with Petroecuador for the purchase of oil. To pay bribes and cover up the scheme, Enrique Pere signed a consulting agreement with company 1 in which the company agrees to pay the consultancy a commission per barrel Ecuadorian that the company purchases from the Asian state-owned company through the contract with Petroecuador. A similar scheme was used to benefit company 2, only in this case it was done through a contract between the Ecuadorian oil company and a state-owned company in the Middle East, whose name is not disclosed, but the United States claims to know it.”

Three officials reportedly received bribes from Pere, although in the records of the US judicial process they have identified themselves as “Ecuadorian officer 1, 2 and 3″, Fernando Villavicencio, an Ecuadorian legislator who has investigated the cases of Alex Saab and Petrochina, confirmed to Infobae that one of the officials would be Nilsen Arias, former International Trade Manager of Petroecuador between 2010 and 2017. Arias's name is also included in the case of Vitol Inc., which is also being investigated in the United States.

In the case of Vitol Inc. , the US Department of Justice states that “Consultants 1 and 2 ″ — one of them Nilsen Arias — would receive a commission from Vitol for every barrel of fuel oil they obtained from the contract with Petroecuador. The “consultants” in turn “would use part of these funds to pay bribes to Ecuadorian officials on behalf of Vitol,” according to the portal Journalismo de Investigación.

Arias would have helped to hire fake consultancies, to create shell companies and to issue fictitious invoices to transfer funds to offshore companies involved in the Vitol conspiracy and the “consultants”.

Villavicencio assured Infobae that in 2017 he already denounced the Pere Ycaza brothers to the State Attorney General's Office “as the main lobbyists in the corruption plot of Petrochina, Unipec and Oman Trading International (OTI)”. However, the legislator says, Ecuadorian justice has not yielded results unlike what the US judicial system has done.

For Villavicencio, it is time that, with the evidence and statements that have been given in the US courts, the Ecuadorian justice system calls to trial those involved in the corruption plot “led by Rafael Correa, Jorge Glas, Nilsen Arias and others.”

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